Cyanogen, Inc Hires New VPs from HTC, MediaTek, and Hulu

Cyanogen, Inc. has added some new talent to their executive team. In an announcement on their blog, Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster listed three new additions to their leadership team. Dave Herman is their new VP of Product. Herman has a background with Hulu, Microsoft, and Amazon and helped to build some of their big products. Tyler Carper is the new VP of Engineering. He worked at Microsoft on the Xbox, and most recently worked at HTC on their software side. The new VP of Global Partnerships and Distribution at Cyanogen is Vik Natarajan, who was the VP of Corporate Marketing at MediaTek. He’s also worked for Broadcom.

McMaster is excited about the new territory that Cyanogen is stepping into. “We would like to announce today several key hires on the leadership team of Cyanogen Inc. that will help us scale & build a global phenomenon built by you… for you,” he says. They are building towards a time in the next five years when AOSP, and CyanogenMod, will be running on over a billion devices. Sounds like Cyanogen, Inc has a similar vision and focus that Google does, aiming at the next billion users. Those are big aspirations from the fledgling company that began a side project a few short years ago.

Cyanogen, Inc. has inked deals with Oppo and, most recently, OnePlus to install their version of Android on smartphones. The Oppo N1 launched running Oppo’s custom UI overlay, but a special variant of the device could be ordered that runs CyanogenMod out of the box. The OnePlus One is shipping with a tailor-made version of CM11 built just for the One. The company is adding new features and differentiating themselves the competition, and continues to look for new hardware partners that like what they are building.

Cyanogen, Inc. has had its share of growing pains. When the company was officially announced, some developers and contributors were unhappy and split off, building their own custom ROM instead. Some early members have left to pursue their own endeavors. The company is still excited, growing and adding talent.